Varney – the Forgotten Vampire
By Lauren Owen, Durham University
Who is Varney? He is rather overshadowed by other pre-Dracula vampires like Lord Ruthven, the Byronic villain of Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre” (1819), or Carmilla, the dangerously seductive anti-heroine of LeFanu’s 1872 novella of the same name.
Varney, the Vampyre was a long-running serial probably written by James Malcolm Rymer between 1845 and 1847. (The work was also associated with Thomas Preskett Prest, who is credited with the authorship of The String of Pearls, the novel which introduced the vill

Reading Architecture Across the Arts and Humanities
An AHRC-Funded Interdisciplinary Conference
University of Stirling
Saturday 5th December 2015
First Call for Papers
The organisers of this one-day multidisciplinary conference seek to solicit proposals for 20-minute papers that consider the creation, expression and representation of architecture, architectural space and the built environment from students and scholars working within all subject-areas across the Arts and Humanities. Papers should seek to address the creation, understanding, circulation and cultural impact of both real

CFP: Sonic Horror
“Shh—was that a voice?”
Sound is arguably one of the most fear-provoking aspects of horror. Ghost stories and horror films employ sonic tropes such as creaking floor boards, sudden loud thumps, or ephemeral children’s choirs in order to enhance suspense through the evocation of unseen terror. “The spectre of sound”, as Kevin Donnelly has called it, creeps up on us dorsally, evading the relative comfort of visual recognition. Sonic horror tropes have also been used to imbue other genres, such as musical theatre and popular music, with elements of horror. Whether

The lights inside the venue suddenly went out. Darkness was holding each and every member of the audience in its strong grip. Vague shapes on the dark stage started to move, accompanied by unfamiliar noises that caused shivers going down my spine. All of a sudden a deep, howling and ominous voice started telling the story of terror that is about to happen in front of our eyes, the story of “a decrepit corpse ridden London, plagued by Zombies, a city ruled by the undead and climaxing in an awesome flaming apocalypse”. The Night of the Zombie has begun. Set in 2020, “the story

UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGES
FULLY-FUNDED DOCTORAL STUDENTSHIP: Literature and Architecture, 1700—1850.
The School of Arts and Humanities is pleased to invite applications for this three-year, fully-funded PhD Studentship (fees and subsistence at current AHRC UK/EU rates). Funded by the University of Stirling, this studentship is designed to complement an AHRC Leadership Project entitled ‘Writing Britain’s Ruins, 1700-1850: The Architectural Imagination’. Led by Dale Townshend, and supported by post-Doctoral Fellow Dr Peter Lin

Gothic became a self-parodying genre very quickly: Jane Austen wrote the self-reflexive Northanger Abbey in 1798, though it did not see publication for nearly twenty years after that. Two hundred years later, the gothic has expanded and adapted, and a mocking inter-textual awareness is a key quality for the popularity of the genre. The audience for this fiction has long been perceived as skewing feminine, as is recognized and critiqued in Austen’s work. The modern southern gothic of True Blood (2007-2014), and American gothic Supernatural (2005-ongoing), also recognize a majority female fan

Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition
By Timothy Baker
In 2001 Edinburgh University’s Polygon Press released a collection of short stories entitled Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction, bringing together stories from influential writers such as Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, John Burnside and Janice Galloway. Published barely three years after the establishment of a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1998 and appearing in the first breaths of the new millennium, the collection has been key in highlighting the pervasive nature of Gothic creative writing in Scotlan

Merchants of Menace: the Business of Horror Cinema.
Edited by Richard Nowell
New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
ISBN: 978-1-6235-6420-9
Reviewed by Ann Davies
Richard Nowell’s introduction to this collection of essays is subtitled ‘There’s Gold in Them There Chills’, a phrase which summarises the common thread that unites the essays: the Gothic and horror as industry and money-making opportunity. This reflects the increasing academic interest in film production and industry more widely in Film Studies, but is in any case a different approach from the usual tendency to analyse horror fil

Open Graves, Open Minds: ‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives—Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans
Wolves have long been the archetypal enemy of human company, preying on the unguarded boundaries of civilisation, threatening the pastoral of ideal sociality and figuring as sexual predators. Yet, in their way, with their complex pack interactions, they have served as a model for society. Lately, this ancient enemy has been rehabilitated and reappraised, and rewilding projects have attempted to admit them mo

The Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for Gothic Criticism 2015
Reminder: Call for nominations by February 1st.
In 2011, as a memorial to its founding President Dr Allan Lloyd Smith (1945-2010), the International Gothic Association established a prize to be awarded for a scholarly publication considered to have advanced the field of Gothic studies significantly. For the 2015 incarnation of the award we are delighted to announce that there will be two Prizes of £100 each: one for a standout monograph published on the Gothic over the last two years, and another for an edited collection

About

The Gothic Imagination is based at the University of Stirling, Scotland and provides an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the Gothic mode. Queries to Dr Timothy Jones on timothy.jones@stir.ac.uk.

About

The Gothic Imagination is based at the University of Stirling, Scotland and provides an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the Gothic mode. Queries to glennis.byron@stir.ac.uk or dale.townshend@stir.ac.uk